The Relaunch

Can Barack Obama catch Hillary Clinton?

From 1993 to 2004, Barack Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School. According to his students, he was a gifted teacher. “If you had just a surface opinion, he would ask why you held it. He always dug deeper,” Barbara Blank, a lawyer—and a Republican—practicing in Washington, D.C., told me earlier this year. Another former student, Josh Pemstein, said, “He liked being challenged, and he liked challenging us, as well.” Perhaps unintentionally, Obama lapsed into his pedagogic persona during a recent visit to Agassiz Elementary School, in Ottumwa, Iowa. With seven weeks left before the Iowa caucuses—the curious ritual that this year really could set the course for the Democratic nomination and the 2008 election—Obama looked to relaunch his campaign and clarify his differences with his chief rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

It was teacher-parent conference day at Agassiz, and with the children away Obama, who was dressed in dark khakis and a blue shirt, had the school pretty much to himself. In one classroom, he acted as the host of a roundtable discussion on retirement policy. In the gymnasium, he gave a stump speech and took questions. After that, in another classroom, he sat for an interview, during which he tried to make the case for his candidacy. Obama began with foreign policy, but his theme was broader than any single issue; it amounted to the unembarrassed assertion that he is the only candidate willing to be wholly honest with voters.

“I think Hillary is committed to a much more conventional approach,” Obama said. “I believe that we face unconventional threats, and that is going to require a level of personal Presidential diplomacy that can repair the damage that’s been done by George Bush. I think that means the President being involved in talking directly to our enemies, and not just our friends, and being less worried about the conventions of, you know, who we meet with, and what level envoys are sent, and so forth.

“I think we have a very real difference on Iraq,” he went on, citing Clinton’s public statements and her support of the Senate resolution, co-sponsored by Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyl, which was intended to warn Iran about meddling in Iraq. “She believes that our force structure in Iraq should in part be designed to blunt the impact of Iran in Iraq. I think that is too broad a mission and I think sending that signal to the Bush Administration while they’re still in office potentially gives them cover to engage in more aggressive military action.”

As for domestic issues, Obama said, “Obviously, there are differences between health-care plans and energy plans, although they’re relatively modest. They’re more issues of emphasis than they are major ideological differences. I think the differences on domestic issues have more to do with what we think is needed to deliver on the promises that we’re making to the American people.” Obama, who was sticking more closely to talking points than he had in previous conversations, went on, “Hillary is running, in many ways, a textbook campaign. But it’s a textbook that I think is inadequate to the moment. It’s a textbook that says you don’t answer tough questions directly because it may make you a bigger target in the general election—that you tell people what they want to hear but avoid telling some hard truths.”

“Hard truths” could be the slogan for the re-started Obama campaign, which, until the October 30th Democratic debate in Philadelphia, had been viewed as listless and fading. (By contrast, Hillary Clinton was often called the inevitable nominee.) During that debate, Clinton’s performance was criticized as evasive and weak; Clinton herself acknowledged, “I wasn’t at my best.” Afterward, David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, summoning all the spin at his command, described the new, unfettered Obama: “The public is looking for someone who will level with them, even when it means telling them things that they don’t necessarily agree with or want to hear. They value honesty. They value candor. They value straightforwardness. They don’t want calculation and parsing. They don’t want someone who confers with their pollster on every move.”

Obama has begun to embrace positions that a generation of Democrats have been advised to avoid. The political “textbook” calls for a relatively inexperienced first-term senator to run hawkishly. Obama, whom Clinton criticized when he said that he would negotiate directly and without preconditions with America’s adversaries, now makes it a point to mention that he would sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s President. On the question of torture, which Obama unequivocally opposes, the political temptation is to signal a willingness to show no mercy to our worst enemies, in much the way that Governor Bill Clinton, in his first campaign for President, returned to Arkansas for the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a mentally disabled death-row inmate. On the increasingly perilous subject of illegal immigration, Obama favors issuing state driver’s licenses to undocumented workers, and tells voters, “We are not going to send twelve million people back home.” When discussing his energy plan, Obama says, “You can’t deal with global warming without, at least, on the front end, initially, seeing probably some spike in electricity prices,” and on Social Security he proposes what is, in effect, a large tax hike. These issues all have one thing in common: Hillary Clinton’s positions are artfully vague—aimed at surviving the general election—while Obama insists that it is more important to be forthcoming.

On Social Security, Clinton has avoided a detailed approach to fixing the system, which is expected to run out of money by the twenty-forties; for now, she would appoint a trusty “bipartisan commission” to recommend solutions. Obama proposes raising the ceiling on income that is subject to the payroll tax. As a political strategy, this appears to be a terrible idea. A potential crisis in the Social Security system is a long way off. Why, then, would a new President spend political capital on yet another tax hike when he will almost certainly seek to undo the Bush tax cuts for more immediate demands, like universal health care? When I asked Obama about this, he smiled and leaned forward, as if eager to explain that my premise was precisely the politically calibrated approach that he wanted to challenge. “What I think you’re asserting is that it makes sense for us to continue hiding the ball,” Obama said, “and not tell the American people the truth—”

I interrupted: “Politically it makes sense—”

He finished the sentence: “—to not tell people what we really think?”

Obama’s classroom lesson was not about Social Security but about the narrative of the Presidential campaign. “This is precisely the argument that I have with Senator Clinton,” Obama said. “This is what I mean by a textbook campaign. I think there is a conventional wisdom, and this is part of the reason I think Senator Clinton’s campaign has up until now been so well received by the national press.” In other words, political journalists have rewarded the Clinton campaign for its tactical proficiency rather than criticized it for policy inconsistencies.

I asked Obama whether he thought that journalists “respect” Clinton for being so good at politics. “Absolutely. I don’t think that—” he began, at which point Robert Gibbs, his communications director, interrupted to say that the correct word was “revere.” Obama smiled and added, “I think a classic example was when Adam Nagourney writes on the front page of the New York Times an admiring piece about how Hillary has finessed the fact that she voted for the war and gotten people to forget about it.” The article, which was co-written by Patrick Healy and published early last August with the headline “SLOWLY, CLINTON SHIFTS ON WAR, QUIETING FOES,” was hardly admiring. When I asked Nagourney about Obama’s contention, he replied in an e-mail, “This was a very straightforward and simple story: reporting the fact that Mrs. Clinton had repositioned herself on the war in a significant way, and had done so apparently unnoticed by the press and—dare I say?—her opponents.”

It is often true that political reporting is overly focussed on tactics, and, as Obama argues, that coverage of the Clinton campaign—its professionalism and organization—has at times been fawning. Obama’s pique at the Times piece was revealing, suggesting a hope that journalists would make the case against Clinton that Obama himself had declined to make; the Philadelphia debate marked the beginning of his realization that neither his surrogates nor the press were adequate substitutes. He had to make the case himself, and so he rolled out his hard-truths theme. The response from Hillary Clinton so far has been scorn. “For the life of me, I don’t understand what my opponents are trying to achieve,” she told the Time columnist Joe Klein. When he asked Clinton about her reluctance to support funding Social Security with higher payroll taxes on the wealthy, she replied, “I am not going to support a trillion-dollar tax increase.” In explaining why her energy-independence plan is superior to Obama’s, she said, “It’s got to be politically done.”

Obama hopes to persuade voters that doing things “politically” is precisely the problem. He is sometimes criticized for being self-righteous when he berates politicians for behaving like politicians, for he is a skilled politician himself, and there is a political aspect to his argument: he wants voters to contrast what he sees as Clinton’s cynical calculation with his brave honesty. But Obama also wants to make a more substantive point, showing that an emphasis on truthtelling during a campaign can in the long run be better politics. “What happens when we finesse the big issues during the campaign is we never build a mandate,” he told me. “Because the American people start thinking, You know what, these problems are pretty easy to solve. Then we start to actually try to move something through, and then—oops! It turns out we might have to deal with the tax code or there might be a cost associated with capping energy costs. And people aren’t ready for it. Republicans exploit the gap between people’s expectations during a campaign and what actually has to get done. And that’s why we keep on putting things off. So if you believe that these are problems that are incremental in nature, that really you just have to do a tweak here and a tweak there, and that our big problem has been that George Bush has just been a poor manager of government, then I think that Hillary’s arguments are persuasive.”

At Obama headquarters in Des Moines, every other Monday staffers train the precinct captains who will be in charge of rounding up Obama supporters on caucus night, January 3rd. At a recent training session, Chelsea Waliser, an energetic twenty-five-year-old from Washington state, was explaining the byzantine rules of the caucuses—how to win the most delegates for your candidate—to nine women and eight men sitting in a semicircle on mismatched chairs and couches. Waliser, who has long curly red hair, stood before a large pad of paper filled with equations, the sort of thing that sometimes makes the Iowa caucuses seem designed to alienate ordinary people and prevent them from participating. At one point in her presentation, Waliser said, “You have thirty-one members within the preference group. You multiply that by the number of delegates the caucus is going to elect. So how many is that? Eleven, correct. Then divide that by the total number of eligible caucus attendees. So how many caucus attendees do we have? One hundred and four. And then do our math: thirty-one times eleven—three hundred and forty-one, divided by one hundred and four, equals three point two eight.” Her precinct captains looked on in semi-baffled silence.

Unlike the Republican caucuses in Iowa, which are fairly simple, akin to a straw poll, the Democratic caucuses are arcane, rule-bound Party meetings where members are not picking Presidential candidates but choosing delegates to their county conventions. Winning the most delegates for your favored candidate requires not only a sure grasp of mathematics but a keen understanding of group dynamics. In 2004, John Kerry’s precinct captains were generally professionals who knew how to use caucus arithmetic to get more delegates for their candidate, while Howard Dean’s captains were young and poorly trained newcomers who were outmaneuvered in caucus rooms across the state. Waliser is training her captains to be disciplined. Within each precinct, she counselled, an Obama team had to include people responsible for specific tasks, including a “host,” a “greeter,” a “checker,” and a “persuader.” And then there’s the “corraller.” At each caucus, any candidate who does not gain the support of a certain percentage of the attendees—typically, fifteen per cent—is considered nonviable, and supporters may disband and align with other candidates. “Realignment” is a chaotic moment when campaigns descend on each other’s groups and try to poach from them. The arguments used during realignment are notoriously haphazard, ranging from the high-minded (“Join my group because my candidate opposed the war”) to the pedestrian (“Join my group because I loaned you a snow shovel last week”). This, Waliser explained, is why every Obama group needed a corraller—to ward off the poachers. “This person will in a polite and respectful manner physically contain the Obama group and ask them to stay in their place,” she told her precinct captains. She suggested feeding them in case they got restless. “The name of the game on caucus night is stand and stay, so this is where the chocolate-chip cookies are crucial.”

If Hillary Clinton wins in Iowa, she will be harder to stop in later contests. For Obama, the cookies are just the beginning of his campaign’s attention to detail and to the realities of Iowa politics. While Waliser was teaching the intricacies of caucus-night mechanics, a thousand miles away, in Washington, D.C., an array of forty-eight computer processors were mining census demographics, consumer-marketing data, and Iowa-state voter files to form one of the most sophisticated and data-rich portraits of an electorate ever created. This is the work of Ken Strasma, who is among the Democratic Party’s most admired numbers gurus. After being pursued by all the major candidates, Strasma, who helped Kerry to win Iowa in 2004, decided to commit his firm, Strategic Telemetry, to Obama.

In the nineteen-nineties, consultants loved to talk about finely sliced pieces of the electorate pie, such as “soccer moms,” and seemed to discover new segments of the electorate as if they were minor planets in the Kuiper belt. In 2000 and 2004, campaigns used consumer data to work out simple correlations in order to target voters. (For instance, Prius owners tend to vote for Democrats, while S.U.V. owners tend to vote for Republicans.) In the past few years, though, this so-called “micro-targeting technology” has made great leaps forward. Strasma’s firm builds profiles of voters that include more than a thousand indicators, long strings of data—everything from income to education to pet ownership—that he calls “demographic DNA.”

“The actual combinations that we come up with aren’t really anything that you could put on a bumper sticker,” Strasma told me. “You know, soccer moms or office-park dads. Sometimes people will ask to see the formula, and it comes out to ten thousand pages long.” When the demographic DNA is combined with polling and interviews with Iowa voters, Strasma is able to create the political equivalent of a FICO score—the number that creditors use to determine whether a consumer is a good bet to repay a loan. Strasma’s score tells the campaign of the likelihood that a specific Iowan will support Obama.

Obama, who had sometimes seemed to eschew the details of campaigning which Clinton appears to revel in, has become more enmeshed in the state’s idiosyncratic politics. Consider the conquest of Gordon Fischer, a former chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party. Every campaign wanted Fischer’s endorsement, but the Obama campaign pursued him relentlessly. At a recent lunch at the Des Moines Embassy Club, a restaurant on the forty-first floor of the tallest building in the state, Fischer explained how Obama’s Iowa operatives used his closest friends to persuade him to back Obama. One, Lola Velázquez-Aguilú, managed to decorate part of Fischer’s house with photographs of Obama that featured thought bubbles asking for Fischer’s endorsement. (“Has anyone told you how great you look today?” an image of Obama taped to a mirror said. “So, are you ready to sign a supporter card?”) When Obama staffers learned that the late Illinois senator Paul Simon was a hero of Fischer’s, they asked Simon’s son-in-law, Perry Knop, to call Fischer and make the case for Obama. At one point, Obama himself invited Fischer onto his campaign bus and told him that he had to stay aboard until he agreed to an endorsement. When Fischer insisted that he had to make the decision with his wife, Monica, Obama demanded Monica’s cell-phone number, and he called her at once. “Monica, this is Barack Obama,” he said when her voice mail came on. “I’m with your husband here, and I’m trying to go ahead and close the deal for him to support my candidacy. . . . Discuss it over with your man. Hopefully we can have you on board.” The Fischers were sufficiently impressed to endorse him, two weeks later. “I think the Iowa campaign has been run better than the national campaign,” Fischer said.

Obama entered the race as a national celebrity—the star of the 2004 Democratic National Convention. But what once was a national campaign has become an intensely local one. Chelsea Waliser’s training sessions, Strasma’s demographic algorithms, and the courtship of Fischer point to a campaign making its last stand in Iowa. On November 5th, Obama’s campaign sent reporters a research memo that criticized Hillary Clinton for changing her position on ethanol, Iowa’s most parochial issue. The Des Moines Register, Iowa’s major daily, ignored it, but when the campaign offered Obama himself for an interview a story was assured; it appeared on November 7th, with the headline “OBAMA: CLINTON FLIP-FLOPS ON ENERGY.”

I asked Obama whether ethanol was a subject that merited such personal attention. “It has less to do with the particular issue and more to do with her change in position,” he replied. “Now, Hillary has been in the Senate for seven years now. She has consistently voted against ethanol, because the perception in New York state is that this is making gasoline more expensive and that it’s a boondoggle. Those of us in farm states, obviously, have had a different perspective on it. If she came here, and she made a cogent case as to why she doesn’t think ethanol makes sense and why she voted against it, that’d be one thing. After seven years, she comes here and suddenly she’s an ethanol proponent! Well, how did that happen?” He managed to sound genuinely astonished by such brazenness.

In Obama’s stump speech, he has adjusted to the realities of Iowa’s preëminence in the nominating process. In small but important ways, he is sounding more partisan. Over the summer, he barely mentioned George W. Bush; now he emphasizes what he regards as a litany of Bush Administration policy debacles—the Iraq war, the tax cuts, disrespect for the Constitution. The cool and cerebral Obama often gives way to a more fiery candidate who promises to “fight” for working people and against special interests, echoing some of the sharper language that John Edwards, the third major candidate in the race, has been using. And Obama now tries to make a more personal connection with voters. In the past, he has been accused of making his campaign more about himself than about those who come to his rallies. Now the word “you” is mentioned as much as the word “I.” “You’re not heard. They’re not listening to what you need,” he told a crowd assembled at a rodeo site in Fort Madison on a recent evening. “You deserve a President who is thinking about you.”

Iowans have developed many sophisticated ways to squeeze dollars out of Presidential candidates, who are compelled practically to live in their state for four years. The Connecticut senator Christopher Dodd, whose chances of winning are negligible, recently relocated his family to Des Moines and enrolled his six-year-old daughter in kindergarten. For the Iowa Democratic Party, the annual Jefferson Jackson Dinner is the biggest and most profitable enterprise of the cycle. Candidates are encouraged to buy tickets for thousands of their supporters, who perform cheering and sign-waving ballets when their candidate speaks. In 1999, the event marked the turnaround of the Al Gore campaign, and in 2003 it launched John Kerry’s revival. At this year’s dinner, held on November 10th, in Des Moines’s main entertainment arena, Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Obama’s people wore red T-shirts and were split into two sections facing each other. When Obama entered the arena, his supporters launched into a raucous call-and-response of “Fired up! Ready to go!”—a cheer that Obama first heard last summer in South Carolina, when he was talking to a small group and an elderly woman in the room began to shout, “Fired up!” prompting the “Ready to go!” reply. Since then, these words have become his campaign’s signature refrain.

Hillary Clinton’s supporters wore Iowa yellow and green, and the rafters were dotted with what had just become her new campaign slogan: “Turn up the heat. Turn America around.” It wasn’t until she spoke that it became clear what she meant about turning up the heat. Clinton went on to deliver a series of anti-Republican one-liners, posed as questions, such as “When the Republicans cut Head Start, and refuse to fix No Child Left Behind, what do we do?” Her yellow-and-green army responded after each riff, “Turn up the heat!” Clinton’s emphasis on the fall of 2008 rather than on the caucuses of January may prove to be a mistake. The vulnerability that Obama is exploiting is precisely Clinton’s presumptuous turn toward the general election. Since the Philadelphia debate, polls have shown Obama narrowing the gap between him and Clinton in New Hampshire, and in Iowa polls have consistently shown a close race.

What was notable about Obama’s speech at the dinner—one of his finest and most passionate—was not just the roaring choreography from his red-clad supporters but the way that, at 11:30 P.M., he galvanized the entire auditorium, with a succinct description of the difference between his campaign and Clinton’s: “If we are really serious about winning this election, Democrats, we can’t live in fear of losing it.” Even many of Clinton’s troops could be seen beating yellow thunder sticks together in appreciation. Obama seemed to be making an argument about the connection between boldness and electability. With Hillary Clinton, he suggested, there is an inverse relationship between the two: she is so polarizing that she is forced to be a milquetoast candidate in order to become an electable one.

Obama is not the most liberal candidate in the race, so he’s not defining his boldness strictly in ideological terms but, rather, as a sort of anti-politics that prizes truthtelling above calculation. When I asked him about this new tack, he seemed supremely confident. “I’ve been an observer of politics for two and a half decades, and what I’ve seen is that Democrats have not been able to move their agenda through Washington,” he said. “They have not been able to get the American people to embrace their domestic agenda, and they have been constantly on the defensive when it comes to their foreign-policy agenda. And it seems to me that, you know, if you’re not getting the outcomes you want, you might want to try something different.” ♦

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